


your nymph, i'll emerge

by sure sure (getoffmysheets)



Series: Red in Tooth and Claw [10]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Daemons, Eleven Loves Being a Sister, Gen, Hopper is a little confused, Joyce Byers: Head Mom, Lonnie Byers Being an Asshole, Pre-Relationship, Protective Mike Wheeler, Trans Will Byers, Will Byers Deserves Love, but he's got the spirit, yes hi have i mentioned that i love Jonathan Byers today?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:01:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21543445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getoffmysheets/pseuds/sure%20sure
Summary: Will knows what they all think, when they see her, can see the sadness in their eyes. The Upside Down, they're thinking, left its mark on him.He doesn't know how to tell them they're only half right.
Relationships: Will Byers & Mike Wheeler, Will Byers/Mike Wheeler, the Byers family
Series: Red in Tooth and Claw [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1508453
Comments: 15
Kudos: 170





	your nymph, i'll emerge

**Author's Note:**

> Had to edit the ambiguous notes for this, because now that this is finished, Mike and Will were very insist that they are A Real Couple, not just friends, so have some pre-relationship cuteness!

On the first day of Kindergarten, Mike is scared in the way that all small children sometimes are – the harrowing realization that the world is very big and he is very, very small hits him hard. The other children are laughing and playing and talking with each other, but Mike doesn’t know a single soul in his class.

Themis becomes a mongoose in his anxiety and they wander the playground, feeling more and more isolated from their classmates, when they spot a boy on the swings all by himself, just swinging alone with his daemon as a monkey-type creature with a ringed tail clinging to his back.

Mike approaches slowly, with Themis nibbling nervously at his shirt. He says “Um, hello. I’m Mike – and this is Themis.”

The boy looks up, blinks, and does a funny kind of double take, shoes dragging in the dirt as he slows to look at Mike. “Uh…hi,” he says, and then there’s a pause, as though he’s giving Mike space to say something else. “I’m Will and this is Nanna.”

He’s alone too, so maybe…? “Do you wanna be my friend?”

Will says “Yeah!” and smiles at him, bright and brilliant. Mike suddenly feels like everything is gonna be good today and grins back at him.

\---

Will knows that he isn’t like the other kids, without quite knowing how or why. He has Jonathan there to make things easier, because Jonathan never makes him feel like he’s an actor in a play who’s forgotten all of his lines and cues, but his social life is a bit hard until he meets Mike Wheeler. Then it’s hard, sometimes, but at least he has someone who can walk beside him and call the bullies rude names to make him laugh.

After the Upside Down, after the Mindflayer, things are…different.

He’d like to be able to say that it’s because of being gone, and being possessed, and generally just being really stressed out a lot of the time. But that’s only a fraction of it.

When Will gets out of the Upside Down, Nanna has settled. He knows that she’s an insect, like some sort of butterfly, with banded wings of cream and umber, and a little spot down the center of her body.

Hopper stares and stares at her, until Andy nudges at him to remind him that he’s being incredibly rude right now, and he turns his eyes away. He tries to give Will something like a smile. “That ain’t a butterfly, kid,” he says gruffly. “That’s a moth.”

And when Mike shows him the page of the encyclopedia, Will finally hears the part of that sentence Hopper didn’t want to tell him out loud. Nanna’s not ‘a moth’.

She’s a death’s head hawkmoth.

Will knows what they all think. His family, his friends – to an extent, the whole town, though they don’t known the whole story. He knows what they think when they see her, he can see the sadness, the discomfort, the fear in their eyes. They’re thinking the Upside Down left its mark on him forever.

He doesn’t know how to tell them that they’re only half right.

\---

It starts with movies. In particular, the movie Grease.

He doesn’t know it yet, but this was his mother’s first hint, because Will loves Grease. Weirdly, it’s not all the music and dancing that captivate his attention – it’s the outfits. Jonathan suffers an entire summer of ‘You’re the One That I Want’ and he puts up with hair oil and tight jeans when Will wants to play-act the movie.

But Will never wants to be Danny or one of the T-birds.

No, he wants to be _Sandy_ , with her bouncy ponytail and poodle skirts. Lonnie throws multiple fits about this, about Jonathan letting Will put on Mom’s fancy blouses like a dress and twirling him around the living room. When Dad gets mad, Jonathan lets him think it was his idea and not Will’s and he sits through the yelling with stone-faced composure, endures all the name calling and let’s Will do it all over again two days later.

He’s not a slow learner, so it doesn’t take long for Will to figure out that he’s doing something he isn’t supposed to. Jonathan never says anything about how much Dad is screaming at him, never tells Will he needs to stop, but he does anyway, because he doesn’t want Dad to yell, and he doesn’t want Jonathan spend hours in his room with the blankets pulled over his head.

Will still sneaks into Mom’s room sometimes, and puts on the blouses. Stares at himself in the mirror, fascinated. They smell like her, too, which is really nice. Nanna becomes an ermine or a songbird, like the pretty girls in famous portraits have and drapes herself in his arms or perches herself at his shoulder.

‘Dress up’ is his favorite game, but it doesn’t feel like playing. Will feels…more relaxed, more comfortable playing pretend than he does in his own skin.

He doesn’t tell Mike about dress-up right away, but when they’re seven, Will is pretty sure he will be more like Jonathan than Dad. Mike doesn’t seem fussed about wandering around pretending to be other people, and it doesn’t occur to him to wonder why Will is always playing a girl.

They are Will and Nanna and the four of them have fun, and for Mike and Themis, that’s enough. They don’t need an explanation, because it hasn’t occurred to them that this should be different. He doesn’t have the courage to do it in front of Lucas and Dustin, though.

Before even being in the Upside Down, Will has moments where he sorta…gets far away from himself? Like he was sleepwalking in someone else’s body and his own body was drifting away from him. Putting on Mom’s blouses and staring at himself in the mirror helped to feel like he wasn’t splitting apart at the seams, mind and body drifting away from each, to leave his mind floating out in space and his body a hollowed-out shell. But he’d put on one of Mom’s blouses, or one of her dresses, and slid his hands over the nice fabrics and he would feel like he belonged to his body, to _this_ body, for a little while longer.

It got a lot worse after the Upside Down. The Upside Down made that kind of feeling even worse – it didn’t just make his body and mind seem like they were drifting apart. Nanna felt far away, even when she was burrowed as close as she possibly could be, right beside his heart or curled up next his cheek. But it all went numb in the Upside Down.

Nanna became the death’s head hawkmoth the moment that he returned to the real world and ever since that day, the feeling would come back, more severely than ever before.

The blouses and dresses weren’t enough to help him anymore. Will became daring enough to sneak some of her makeup, matte cerise lipstick around his mouth, and coal-black around his eyes. The first time he puts on the full outfit and makeup, Will feels like he’s finally seeing himself, his real self, for the very first time.

He has to do it nearly every day – it’s probably the Mindflayer that makes his mind and body split apart so severely, but he doesn’t realize that until later. Until too late, really. Having the Mindflayer removed doesn’t really help, either. It makes the queasy, sickening sensation that he’s about to lose Nanna go away, but his mind and his body still feel like separate entities from each other.

One morning, Jonathan catches him sitting on his bed, with the mascara and lipstick, in a pair of too-small nylons stretched too thin over his knees, and a dress his mother wore before she got pregnant with either of them.

“Hey buddy, Mom says I gotta-” The words die midsentence and Jonathan and Will are left staring at each other in shocked silence.

Will watches his brother walk around in the bed with trepidation, Nanna perched in her favorite spot at the right side of his hair, looking like a decorative hairpin. Jonathan crouches between his knees, plucking at a run right over the top of his foot. Quietly, he asks “Do you wanna tell me something?”

He shakes his head frantically.

Jonathan tugs at the hem of the dress, pulling it down over his knees properly. Ithunna peers at them from around his wrist. “Are you sure?” she murmurs sweetly. “Because you know you could tell us anything, Will.”

Nanna lands gently on top of her head. She says, “Nothing’s wrong.”

That’s the closest Will can manage to truth. There isn’t a name for what he’s feeling but he’s ninety-nine percent sure that this particular thing doesn’t have anything to do with the Upside Down. This…this is just the way he is.

“I think I’m a queer,” Will whispers to Mike later that same day, laying side by side on Mike’s bed as they stare at the ceiling.

“Yeah?” Mike asks, face scrunching up thoughtfully. Themis weaves between their legs at the bottom of the bed. “How do you know?”

He must be – why else would he have the urge to do such a thing? Will doesn’t know words like ‘gender identity’ or ‘transgender’, he doesn’t have the language to describe how he thinks and feels and his relationship to his own body, which can feel both strange and terrifying. How his own voice dropping makes him jumpy, sometimes, and how seeing himself with makeup on was like seeing the person he was on the inside for the very first time.

“Um…you know how I like to…play dress up?” he says finally.

There is a pause where Mike scratches his nose, and then says, “I know what your dad used to say, but I don’t think that makes you a queer, Will.”

“I don’t…I don’t think I like girls, Mike.” _I want to_ be _one_ , he realizes.

He finds a pair of drugstore stockings and a plain blue shift dress hidden underneath his pillow the next day. The stockings are a larger size, brand new and still in the packaging, not a pair stolen from Mom or Nancy, and the dress still has a sales tag from the Old Navy in the mall.

Will remembers the way Jonathan pulled the dress back down over his knees, like he had some kind of modesty that needed to be preserved. Like…like in the divide between genders, Jonathan had placed Will on the other side from himself.

He puts the stockings and dress on and some of Mom’s mascara and lipstick. Will feels like he’s glowing, like there’s a radiance coming off of his skin. Because this isn’t an outfit borrowed or stolen or pieced together from other people’s cast-offs. Jonathan bought these. On purpose. He _meant_ for Will to wear them.

He walks to the dining room, daring to brave going out of his room with the outfit still on and finds Jonathan eating toast. He pauses with the bread halfway to his mouth, blinking as he sees Will. “It fits.”

Will feels his mouth wobble and Nanna flutters around his shoulders. “Don’t ask me why,” he croaks. “Because I don’t _know_.”

Jonathan puts down the toast and holds out his hand, letting Nanna rest in the hollow of his palm. “Will is Will,” Ithunna says, nosing at her so gently that the moth daemon is never dislodged from her place. “Nanna is Nanna. That’s the only explanation we need.”

Because people saw the skull on her back and they thought he was traumatized without looking at the rest of her. If snakes were the symbols of forbidden knowledge, then Jonathan knew that butterflies and moths were symbols of a transformation, a metamorphosis into another stage of life. He was graced with seeing the moth come from her cocoon.

Will wipes his face. “Don’t tell Mom.”

His brows lift up and Jonathan has a slightly bemused look on his face before he simply says “Okay.”

And that’s that.

\---

August 1985

“Pretty,” El observes, fingers plucking at the blue fabric hidden in the back of his closet. “Will.”

“Hm? Wh-no! No, El, that’s not-” His face bursts into the fiery bloom of embarrassment as Eleven pulls the shift dress from its hook. A bit helplessly, he says “That’s-that’s private.”

Brigantia scoops up Nanna from the bookshelf, and Will, though he trust her and Eleven, feels his stomach swoop with anxiety. “Sister!” El says brightly, and drags him over to the boxes of her stuff. She pulls out piles of clothes from where they’ve been stored for the past month. “Here!”

Will’s blush is so fierce it’s become painful. She’s handed him a bra. “El, I don’t-I haven’t…uh…”

“Sister,” she repeats, and Will’s stomach gives another dizzy swoop when he realizes that El is addressing him. “Needs help with the clothes! Max showed me how to do!”

“Uh…” Will chews his lip before breaking. “Okay.”

Hopper pauses at the end of the hall, staring through the open doorway. “…girls?”

Both turn and he realizes that El’s new friend is more of an old one. “Eleven what have you done to Will?” he demands, staring at Will’s eyes, enormous like Joyce and El’s are. “He’s not your dress up doll.”

“She,” El says absently, and Will makes a noise, a high and strangled laugh. “She, she, she.”

That gives Hopper another pause and Andy circles round his legs, sniffing the air. Repetition is El’s way of placing emphasis on things. It generally means that she wants him to pay attention to what she’s saying, means that it's an idea she's latched onto and won't back down from. “Who’s she?”

“Will is she,” she insists, ignoring the increasingly strange sounds coming from Will’s mouth. “Help Sister’s outsides match the insides. Show her how, like Max showed me.”

Thoroughly confused now, Hopper says “Eleven, you don’t just get to decide that Will is a girl now because you want a sister. Kid, that’s nuts.”

“Will has always been a girl.” El states, matter of fact.

Hopper’s gaze slides off to the side, where Will is sitting stock-still on the end of the mattress, gripping the bedclothes in terror. What really catches his eye is Nanna, fluttering frantically around the crown of Will’s head in a panic. He…she? Looks terrified, the whites of Will’s eyes huge as he-she-they hold them wide open with fear.

Like Jonathan, Hopper knows that the moth is a symbol, the herald of transformation. They’ve all been sitting here assuming that the transformation was the unnatural exposure to everything related to the Upside Down. _Will has always been a girl_.

“Is she coming to dinner?” Andy asks curiously, sitting her giant butt on one of El’s feet.

Will does the strangled laugh again.

“Joyce!” and Will makes another noise, this time like _they’ve_ been shot.

“No-no, I don’t-she-I can’t-” Will’s voice dies away. Mom pops her head through the door, with Sindri looking over her shoulder as always.

Will and Nanna are frozen on the bed, helpless to do anything but stare as Mom walks into the room. Her hand reaches out and touches Will on the chin, tilting their face up toward her. “Oh, good,” she says, thumb pressed to their bottom lip. “Now you can stop borrowing mine. That color was too old for you, baby.”

Will stares at her. “You…knew?”

Gently, feather-light, Mom brushes her fingers over Nanna’s wings. Many times before, she's thought about her son's future partner. How they would need to be gentle, the kind of gentleness that's learned with practice, so that they don't crush poor Nanna's delicate wings. She's tried not to. “The summer of Grease, my wardrobe never the exact way I left it…I had some idea, honey.” She runs her fingers through Will’s hair. “Are you ready to come to dinner now?”

_Are you ready to show the others?_

Will's chin trembles. "They're gonna laugh. Or hate me."

El makes a scoffing noise, a kind of 'we dare them' sound. More peaceably, Brigantia says "They didn't mind me very much. We're much stranger, right?"

Andy huffs, sounding irked. "You aren't strange, you're _special."_

"Will is special," Eleven says firmly, reaching out to squeeze her hands. "She's like me. Sister."

She, she, she.

She holds onto El's hand as they walk to the picnic table. Jonathan murmurs in Nancy's ear as they pass and she looks startled, then worried. Max looked confused and Dustin says "Who's the new girl?" 

"Girl, yes. New, no," El informs him smartly. She moves her hand in a tah-dah! kind of gesture. "Sister."

"Oh that looks a lot better then when we were seven," Mike comments as he sits down next to Lucas. "Did you get El to help you or have you been practicing a lot?"

"Um..."

Erica is squinting at them. "Is that Will in a dress? Why is Will in a dress?"

Mike shrugs. "He likes wearing them, sometimes."

"She," Will whispers in a reedy voice, squeezing hard at El's hand. 

"She likes wearing them, sometimes," Mike says automatically and then pauses to backtrack that sentence. "She?"

"She," Will repeats, anxiously holding his gaze. Her stomach feels queasy. _It's not my fault you don't like girls._

Mike shrugs again and shoves his fork into the potato salad. "She."

"Hold on," Dustin says loudly, outraged. "You knew about this the whole time?"

Will watches in something like bemused humor and astonishment as the whole table erupts into an argument - not about Will's new pronouns but about Mike's prior knowledge. "...friends don't lie!"

"I didn't _lie!"_

"I think that was good," Eleven says brightly, watching the three boys shout at each other while Max, Robin and Steve look like they're watching a live tennis match.

A burble of helpless laughter escapes her, tumbling out of Will's mouth like a waterfall. It grows and grows until she's holding her sides, half bent at the waist, relief and the sheer ridiculousness of their behavior making shrieks of laughter flood out of her. 

"You're missing something," Nancy tells her thoughtfully, then pulls something out of her bag. Carefully, she places a headband with a pink ribbon in Will's hair. "There! Now you look like Alison from The Breakfast Club."

Jonathan smirks at Will. "I think we're all the basket case here."

Night falls and there are fireworks, a celebration of Billy and Hopper's return to life. 

Mike takes her hand as he leads her to the blankets laid out in the back of the house. Will smiles at him, bright and brilliant, and he just knows. This is gonna be a good day.


End file.
